Exploring a Scientific Framework of Consciousness while revisiting Ancient Wisdom

Aashutosh Kulakarni

Exploring a Scientific Framework of Consciousness while revisiting Ancient Wisdom 

 

The feeling of being conscious and sentient is most familiar to each of us and fundamental to life itself. We have become so accustomed to it that we seldom ponder its bizarreness and yet, it is the greatest mystery that life has to offer. How are we chunks of flesh and bone with a peculiar yet incredibly distinct inner life? Why are we conscious at all? There is no greater quest in life than to dwell on this deep mystery, to investigate it, and attempt to unravel it.

A lifetime of scientific conditioning seems to hint to us that consciousness is created in the brain, by the brain. After all, isn’t the world made up of matter and energy, so our consciousness is too? Well, it may seem surprising for some to learn that not only does science have no real evidence for this narrative, but it also has no clue where to start looking for consciousness! All it can observe is a flutter of neural activity that correlate to specific conscious experiences, but correlation is not causality. Despite this, staunch materialist philosophers like Daniel Dennett at Tufts University insist that consciousness isn’t really all that important since it can be nothing but a by-product of our brains and as a result, there really is no deeper meaning to life. This notion, however, that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon of the brain isn’t questioned as much as it should be. Materialism analyses the world objectively and breaks down the objects of the world down to matter. The grave mistake in treating consciousness as any other object in the world is that consciousness itself is not an object to be perceived. Instead, it would be more accurately described as that which perceives everything! As the 19^th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once stated, “Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” Now that I have, with the support of Schopenhauer, thrown doubt over conventional material philosophy, it is worth considering what the nature of the problem really is.

Often, problems of consciousness that are investigated deal with both the mind and consciousness. These are commonly termed as the ‘Easy problems of consciousness’. Take, for example, the question of our attention. How are we able to consciously focus our attention onto a specific task? The answer to this question is one of objective processing. A study of the neural patterns and pathways that are involved in focusing attention can provide a sufficient explanation. Or how do we access our memories? Again, identifying the parts of the brain associated with memory and the corresponding neural mechanisms can provide us with an accepted solution. Underlying all the easy problems, however, is a problem that is deeper on a scientific and philosophical level. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

A term that was first coined by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher who resides at NYU, the hard problem refers to the very feeling of consciousness itself, not merely its functional attributes. Why do we have a subjective experience of consciousness at all? Why aren’t we just chunks of thinking and processing flesh that can robotically interact with the world without inner lives? Why does consciousness feel like anything at all? These deep questions have quite distinct differences from the easy problems. The easy problems seek to question how specific conscious experiences are correlated to the brain. The hard problem asks not only how we are conscious at all, but more importantly, why we are conscious. The materialist philosophy falls treacherously short of providing any meaningful answer to this question. Neural mechanisms in the brain provide not a shred of an explanation as to why it generates a subjective experience. In an interview with Serious Science, David Chalmers states that the hard problem is “ultimately a question for science, but it’s a question which right not, our scientific methods don’t have a very good handle on. So at least for now, it's a central question for philosophy.” What he implies is that the reductionist, material approach nature of most science makes it quite unequipped to deal with the hard problem. Therefore, since all of us are conscious (hopefully), we could use philosophy to navigate this problem better than science can, for now.

If science could avoid the typical materialist route, perhaps a worthwhile scientific theory of consciousness can be conjured up. Conveniently, this has been done. Introducing, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a new scientific hope! The key to this theory, as the name suggests is integrated information. Integrated information, simply put, is a measure of the back-and-forth interactions between component parts of a system. The maximum amount of integrated information that a system has, denoted by Φ is equivalent to the consciousness that a system possesses. What this means is that when systems, of any sort, have bits of information being shared between parts of the system that influence each other, there is a certain degree of consciousness associated with the system. The resulting claim of IIT is that our brains are not the only locations of consciousness but every single interacting system, like my laptop or the internet, is conscious to an extent.

While this idea may seem bizarre, it leads to a serious line of philosophical thinking known as panpsychism, that figures like David Chalmers and the neuroscientist Christof Koch are strong proponents of. Unlike materialism, which argues that consciousness emerges from physical matter and, on the other hand, dualism which proposes that consciousness and matter are separate entities, panpsychism postulates that like matter, consciousness is also a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Little ‘cells’ of consciousness exist everywhere and pervade the entire universe. Under the right conditions and interactions, they are sufficiently complex enough to generate a conscious experience as intricate and subjective as ours. Panpsychism and IIT try to unify consciousness as being integrated all the way down to the most fundamental levels. Take an atom for example. The atom that consists of its subatomic particles has its own interactions within it as the electron orbits the nucleus. Each atom, therefore, has its own tiny spark of consciousness. Hence consciousness must pervade the entire material universe.

Both IIT and panpsychism face shortcomings, however. The philosopher John Searle, in a review of Christof Koch’s book ‘Consciousness’, brings up the circularity problem faced by IIT. He argues that “you can’t explain consciousness by saying it consists of information, because information exists only relative to consciousness.” What this means is that information itself can only have value to a conscious observer, therefore consciousness itself cannot be dependent on information. A second shortcoming of IIT appears in the mathematical predictions it makes on the degree of consciousness possessed by objects. Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas Austin, revealed that IIT’s mathematics predicts information systems such as a compact disc to be more conscious than humans are. To any sane person, this prediction seems absurd! It also brings up the problem of solipsism, which is the idea that we can only ever be sure of the existence of our individual self and consciousness. Therefore, if I can’t even be sure if other humans are conscious, how am I to believe that a CD can be more conscious than I? Christof Koch thinks that a ‘consciousness meter’ can be devised to tackle this problem. A meter that uses a ‘zap and zip’ method, which involves zapping brains with magnetic pulses and zips the entire brains response to a single number. However, even if realized, this device would again be dealing with the easy problems of consciousness, that relate to neural capability and its correlation to conscious experience. It would not shed more insight into the hard problem and there seems no way to use it on inanimate objects.  

Furthermore, panpsychism is plagued with the combination problem. There is no explanation for the unification of the proposed tiny, individual cells of consciousness into a single human consciousness. Why don’t I have a million subjective experiences instead of just one? Finally, IIT, despite its attempts, is not an entirely convincing answer to the hard problem as it merely suggests that interacting parts of a system has some degree of consciousness. It does not offer a convincing answer to the real question, which is why consciousness feels the way it does at all. Why does information give rise to a subjective experience? These questions seem to have no plausible solution in sight through the framework of IIT. Since I do not find IIT to be a satisfying answer, I will turn towards more ancient philosophy and spiritual insights, if you will.

Philosophers and scientists intrigued by the hard problem often develop an interest towards Buddhism and rightfully so. Christof Koch, in a conversation with the Dalai Lama, found that some of his views on panpsychism matched the Buddhist views on consciousness. The late Buddhist master Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche stated that the mind, while it is empty like all objects in the universe, is also luminous. This luminosity is felt as consciousness. Soto Zen Buddhism also asserts that consciousness and sentience is present everywhere in varying degrees. This idea follows a similar vein to the proposal of IIT, that consciousness exists at different degrees in every interacting system in the universe. However, Buddhism diverges by insisting that the key to the hard problem is not scientific analysis, but meditation. Meditation leads to an understanding of the mind and eventually, when one attains Nirvana (liberation), the answers to all questions of life become clear. While I don’t doubt this, Buddhism emphasizes compassion and meditation over intellectual inquiry. To a mind that craves a bit of philosophical satisfaction, this seems underwhelming.

The next system of philosophy that I will consider is Vedanta, one of the six orthodox schools of Hinduism. The central theme of Vedanta, specifically Advaita (Non-dual) Vedanta is that consciousness encompasses everything in the universe. While IIT and panpsychism postulate that consciousness pervades the universe at varying levels, Vedanta goes a few steps further and declares that nothing exists apart from consciousness. The consciousness that Vedanta refers to is not just the localized consciousness that we feel, but a larger, transcendent and non-local consciousness. Our subjective consciousness is simply a reflection in the mind of the transcendental consciousness. What I find very valuable in Vedanta is that it clearly distinguishes the mind and consciousness itself. Almost all of neuroscience and modern philosophy of mind does not make an effort towards this distinction. While the mind certainly does process conscious experiences, Vedanta claims that the mind itself is merely an object of our consciousness. Consider the nature of our minds. Our minds are oceans of constant change. Our thoughts vary every second, our emotions are malleable to the slightest of forces and our tendencies have changed drastically over years. And yet, our sentience itself and the very feeling of life has always been the same. Our consciousness on its own, without association to the changing mind, has been unwavering. Moreover, deep sleep or lack of awareness under anesthesia is considered a ‘disappearance’ of consciousness. Vedanta on the other hand makes the claim that these states are not absences of conscious experience, but a consciousness experience of absence. This stunning claim suggests that it is the mind that is ‘switched off’ and as a result, there are no objects to be experienced.

To further this point, consider the easy and hard problems of consciousness. The easy problems all boil down to conscious mental states of the mind. The hard problem however is not a problem of consciousness and the mind, it is a problem of only consciousness. Vedanta asserts that this underlying sentience and consciousness is our true nature. It encourages us to investigate every experience that we have and begin to see this as an indubitable fact of every second of our lives. It also offers a path, like Buddhism, to realize this truth in our lives.

Going back to a quote from David Chalmers who mentioned that “at least for now, (the hard problem) is a central question for philosophy.” I would argue that it will forever be a question for philosophy that science will always fall short of answering. The nature of science is to study what we can perceive from world. To reiterate the Vedantic perspective, consciousness is not an object to be perceived, it is that which perceives everything. Therefore, the very nature of science makes it destined to be erroneous!

Ultimately, I turn towards spirituality to lead this highest quest of life, not science and not even conventional western philosophy. I will end by quoting Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk who resides in Manhattan and has facilitated the conversation regarding consciousness tirelessly. In response to the growing attempt to develop conscious Artificial Intelligence, he states: “The basis of AI is that consciousness is material and can be infinitely divided and manipulated. The basis of spirituality is that consciousness is not material. It is indivisible and transcendent and that is where we must seek to find peace.”